Patents Citing More than 2,500 References

Over the past year-and-a-half, 52 utility patents have issued that each cite more than 2,500 references.  It turns out that the vast majority of those patents are owned by one company –  Personalized Media Communications. PMC's recently issued patents also have the dubious honor of each having been filed prior to the 1995 change in patent term. Thus, PMC's patents will remain in force 17 years from the date of issuance even though they were filed more than 16 years ago. 

The second major excessive citer is Pelikan Technologies. Pelikan's patents relate to diabetes diagnostic tools, including electronic lancing. The other companies with excessive citations of prior art include Abbott Diabetes, Aloft Media, Angiotech Pharma, and Bayer Healthcare.(I could not find any patents that issued from 2000 through 2009 that cited more than 2,500 references).

Why do PMC's patents take so long to issue? First, lets talk about what did not happen: (1) PMC never needed to appeal an examiner rejection; (2) PMC never even received a final office action; and (3) the application was not held back because of a secrecy order. Rather, the problem seems to be that PMC filed too many applications in 1995. Since PMC was only a small company with a so many patent applications, the PTO decided that it should "coordinate" the examination of PMC's patents. The result appears to be simply that the PTO created excessive delay, including four PTO-initiated suspensions of prosecution and Office Actions penned by at least three different examiners.

In one case that I looked at, some of the key file-history entries include: